


Within the Witching Webs

by TrivialPursuit



Category: Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad things happen to Milady, Bad things happen to Thomas, F/M, Gen, Incomplete, Madeleine AU, Pre-Series, what? nobody knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:33:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8026204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: In an old house in Paris covered by vines lived twenty little girls in two straight lines.





	Within the Witching Webs

**Author's Note:**

> I started working on this a ridiculously long time ago, forgot about it, and just found it again. After re-reading it and finding that it was pretty good, even if decidedly unfinished, I decided to post it, if only because that might spur me to give it a halfway decent ending.

 

 

 

_During the last winter of her life the word around the school was that Olya Meshcherskaya had simply gone out of her mind from the wild gaiety of her life._

_– "Light Breathing", Ivan Bunin_

 

 

In an old house in Paris covered by vines lived twenty little girls in two straight lines. The lines of girls were led by a tall thin man in the red vestments of a Cardinal. Nobody is quite sure how or why this great man of the Church is the head of a girl's school, but he is. The girls are, for the most part, the daughters of the Church's most devoted patrons, almost all of them clever, beautiful, and rich. There are only a few girls who are not the latter, and those are  _exceptionally_  clever, attending by the grace of  _Le Bon Dieu_ and his Eminence, the Cardinal. 

The girls exit in the aforementioned fashion every Sunday to go hear Mass in the Cathedral and a man could set his watch by the time they pass his door. Each girl wears an identical blue coat buttoned to her throat and a Breton with a blue ribbon  around the crown. Each girl's feet are encased in perfectly shined shoes that tap out a metronome on the cobbles that would put the Foreign Legion to shame. 

Every Sunday (plus holy days and special occasions) the girls pass another school. This school is less nice. It is populated by boys who, though all full to the brim with the bluest of French blood, are not what anyone would call  _nice_  boys. When they go to church ( _if_  they go to church; holy days only for most of them, and only the most important ones) their lines lack precision, with a distinct tendency both for breaking rank and for swaggering about like peacocks. Their uniforms are not neatly pressed, their shoes not shined, their ties loose and rumpled. The older boys smoke, drink, and whistle at pretty girls while the younger ones already know how to play all the most popular card games and swear like people with breeding far more vulgar than their own. 

When it comes to the boys, the girls, for the most part, do not do much more than giggle behind their hands and swoon in the privacy of their rooms, as girls of a certain age are wont to do. It would be ruinous to do anything else and the Annes wield the prospect of social ruin like a surgical blade. 

The Annes are a pair of girls who seemed to have sliced up the entire school between them, each with her own court and provenance, each dispensing the law as they see fit. The kinder one was Ana María, who was some Spanish  _Infanta_ , rumoured to be the future queen of vast country. She helped the younger girls with their studies, went with the nuns to administer to the sick, and made sure to go to the chapel every day to say her prayers. She was, in every respect, a model of piety. Anne-Clarice was, in almost every way, her exact opposite. Though she somehow acquired the nickname 'Milady', she had neither title nor fortune to speak of and was one of the Cardinal's scholarship students. It was rumoured she was the natural daughter of someone important (said to be the Cardinal himself) and one of Montmartre's  _femmes des nuit_ , which everybody found quite scandalous and shocking. Instead of driving these daughters of the Church away from her, they clung close, worshipping the sin and mystery in which she was steeped. 

One of the girls, Adele, will sigh and say she is like a character from an opera, though nobody can picture the formidable Milady flinging herself from the battlements for anyone. ('Lady Macbeth flung herself from the battlements,' tiny Thérèse Dubois whispers, though nobody pays her any mind)

Ana María's group were the Good Girls and Anne-Clarice's were the Bad Girls. In name, at least, the lines of division were simple. The girls in Ana María's court were not necessarily good or kind or rich or pious just as the girls in Anne-Clarice's were not inherently wicked or sinful or poor. This is where the lines become blurry, the differences between the two are less about truth and more about perspective. Perhaps the only difference between the two is that Anne-Clarice does not suffer fools, will not nurture them or allow them into her midst; cleverness is prized above all else, above beauty, above talent, above morals, above capacity for duplicity. 

In spite of all that she implies, the boys do not like Anne-Clarice. She does not give them what they want, but she takes what they do not offer and they never quite know how to find it again. Whenever a new boy shows up they point and say 'Stay away from her, she’ll eat your heart.' The boy inevitably ignores the warning and winds up standing in the middle of the dormitory with a lost look on his face, unsure of what happened, only that something did happen. They do not laugh at him, because they have all stood in the middle of the dormitory, dumbfounded and afraid. 

Thomas de la Fére, the younger son of the Comte de la Fére, follows Anne-Clarice around like a puppy for almost two years, far longer than any boy before him, his devotion never morphing into fear and loathing, staring at her as she filed past, braving the Cardinal's wrath to climb over the wall and do her bidding for a few short hours. Even as Thomas stared at her as if she was Minerva reborn, she flirted with his elder brother, smiling winningly, tilting her head up to expose her long white neck, adding the extra sway to her walk whenever they walk past the school, spending hours on her  _toilette_  before church for a few moments of appreciation (though what  _appreciation_  it is; there is no greater admirer of Milady's art). For Olivier d'Athos de la Fére, Vicomte de Bragelonne, the girls titter, their Milady has lost her head completely. 

But one year Thomas does not return from holidays. In later years the students of both schools will think of this as Year 1 After Disappearance and this will be how they count their remaining days at school; there will be no “In the Year of Our Lord, …” except on assignments, instead they will date their lives relative to his absence. It will be the fulcrum upon which much of their lives hinge, defining them in unexpected ways. 

It is the first event in which the unofficial wall of silence between the two schools is broken, each side proposing theories more outlandish than the last. Some say he was sent home due to some great shame while others say he went mad and was confined to a sanatorium, locked in a straight-jacket with nobody by an ugly orderly to hear his screams. Perhaps he was shipped off to Switzerland or one of the colonies, locked in the attic, addicted to opium, imprisoned, cast out by the family, or even dead. 

All that is know for sure is that whatever happened was Anne-Clarice's fault, since Athos stares at her like she is Queen Jezebel reborn whenever she walks past while she does nothing, the only hint of change a slight straightening of the spine, almost as if she was being pulled by a rope.  

The year Thomas de la Fére disappears is also the year exciting new blood enters the schools. For the girls it is a pretty Moor named Samara, whose father is an important general and so can attend the school despite being a heathen, Christine Marie, a sharp, clever  _princesse du sang_  whose elder sister has already gone through the school and whose elder brother is supposed to be king some day, and Ninon de Larroque, the  _gauche caviar_  daughter of one of the best families in the country. The boys ranks swell with the addition of René d’Herblay, called Aramis out of some desire to sound like a romantic hero, the younger son of some minor noble who seduced a girl, and Porthos, rumoured to be the natural son of an enslaved African princess and the handsome nobleman who freed her and is now paying for his bastard's education at the best school the child could could hope for. It is, all in all, a very exciting crop of students. 

Somehow Athos, who hadn't ever been particularly social with anyone and drinks far too much for someone his age, end up friends with the two new boys, forming themselves into a sort of incomprehensible brotherhood. 

There is another change that occurs in this year of great change, though it is so benign in appearance that it is noted only as one of the many unimportant changes in style made by young women of a certain age before being dismissed. Anne-Clarice, famous for her long white neck, which she put to its best advantage whenever possibly by wearing dresses that bared her chest or shoulders, emphasizing the erotic swoop of neck into collarbones and heaving bosom, begins wearing a thick velvet ribbon around her neck which she will never be seen without again.

(Later, Fleur Baudain will joke she’s like the woman in the story their older brothers used to frighten them with: remove her ribbon and her head falls off.)

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from chapter four of Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated by James Falen. The full line is 'The less we love her when we woo her,/The more we draw a woman in,/And thus more surely we undo her/Within the witching webs we spin.'
> 
> The epigraph comes from the short story "Light Breathing" by Ivan Bunin.
> 
> [ Let's burn together](https://myladydisdainareyouyetliving.tumblr.com)


End file.
